Mike Rowe for President
If I had told my grandfather there would be headlines predicting the end of individuality on account of new goggles strapped to our heads he would have told me to grow a pair. Then gotten in line for the first Vision Pro.
Election years are always heavy with exaggerated pessimism; the mood this year appears to couple this pessimism with a lack of agency. So fashionable is our self-castration that people seem justified in fretting that the Vision Pro is a harbinger of social doom.
Blind in one eye and with only a grade-school education, my grandfather became the largest dry wheat farmer in the world. He got there because he did crazy shit like mounting GPS devices and air compressors to tractors to shoot seeds into the ground so he could till with more accuracy and buy cheap land without water. He lived with hard constraints but embraced innovation. He was an Optimist, American.
I look for the same tenacity and no-nonsense practicality in assembling teams — connecting the dots of the present to build teams of service to the future. I was actually fired by my grandfather one summer for backing over a generator with a harvester. So I learned the future also needs the present. You can be an Optimist but you better also believe in consequence.
With this in mind, I’m now after bigger game. I want to recruit the President of the United States of America. My In-mails remain unanswered but nonetheless I have a recruiting vision: Mike Rowe — yes, of Dirty Jobs fame — for President. You think a TV personality can’t be an effective President? Uncle Ronald begs to differ.
My grandfather said his job was to work the “piss and vinegar” out of me. He was a practical man and took things at face value. Like Rowe, he had a way of putting things simply: “It’s not a proud day to be a Republican or Democrat.”
Pops taught me to fly, using the plane to manage a patchwork of holdings. But it was the perspective of being up high that he valued most: “From above, you see how things are the way they are, why a town is there, a river there. Things make sense”.
Since getting my wings, I’ve given hundreds of people their first flights. A surprisingly high percentage tell me it was transcendent because it allowed them to see the day-to-day rat race in a different way. Seeing your neighborhood, city or even shadow from three thousand feet is the spiritual opposite of descending down the social media doom loop. Flying is fundamentally optimistic.
I’m an Optimist, American and for me, reclaiming agency is our most important expression of patriotism. “Always first fly the plane” Pops said, when I became entranced by the technology in front of me. So let’s pull out the IV of social media and get to work. We know how to build. This is our national legacy. If we can focus on worthy problems, I’m confident more bulldozers will appear.
While I might personally want to back over a set of Vision Pro like I did the generator, I appreciate practical people who embrace innovation. I’d like to imagine the grimy face of Mike donning a pair, as he flips through my emails, perhaps grinning. I’ll keep planting candidates in tough soil, like my grandfather did seeds.
